His father died before he was born, and Edward Barnard was raised in poverty as the Civil War raged in Tennessee. He had almost no formal schooling, and went to work as a photographer's apprentice when he was nine years old, but he had an intense fascination for the universe. Absent any formal training, he discovered numerous comets, eventually earning a scholarship to Vanderbilt University. In his first professional post at the Lick Observatory, he discovered Amalthea (Jupiter's fifth-known moon). He devised wide-field photographic techniques for studying the heavens, and in his career discovered sixteen comets and Barnard's Star, the closest star in the second-nearest star system.